Energy holds supercomputing high ground
Energy holds supercomputing high ground
By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff
The government has the four fastest computers in with world, and 75 of the 500 fastest, as ranked on a semiannual list updated last week on the Web at
www.top500.org.
Federally funded supercomputers captured seven of the top 10 spots on the latest list. Three Energy Department computers and a brand-new Navy machine hold the top four positions.
Another 13 federally funded systems appear on the list. Twenty-two of the 75 federal computers are listed as classified, without specifying a funding agency.
As in past years, Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, a program for simulating on massively parallel computers the aging of nuclear weapons, tops the list.
The Intel ASCI Red supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., remains No. 1 with a Linpack performance of 2.38 trillion floating-point operations per second.
Two other ASCI machines, Blue Pacific at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., remained second and third.
Top supercomputers |
Rank
(federal/overall) |
Supercomputer |
TFLOPS |
Processors |
1/1 |
Intel ASCI Red at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M. |
2.38 |
9,632 Pentium III Xeons |
2/2 |
IBM ASCI Blue Pacific at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. |
2.14 |
5,808 PowerPC 604es |
3/3 |
SGI ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M. |
1.61 |
6,144 MIPS R10000s |
4/4 |
IBM RS/6000 SP at Naval Oceanographic Office, Bay St. Louis, Miss. |
1.42 |
1,336 IBM Power3s |
5/7 |
Classified Cray T3E 1200 |
0.89 |
1,084 Alpha EV5s |
6/8 |
Cray T3E 1200 at Army HPC Research Center, Minneapolis |
0.89 |
1,084 Alpha EV5.6s |
7/10 |
Classified Cray T3E 900 |
0.82 |
1,324 Alpha EV5s |
8/11 |
IBM RS/6000 SP at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn. |
0.72 |
704 IBM Power3s |
9/12 |
SGI Origin2000 Nirvana at Los Alamos lab |
0.69 |
2,048 MIPS R10000s |
10/13 |
Cray T3E 900 at Naval Oceanographic Office |
0.68 |
1,084 Alpha EV5s |